Capturing The Sole Essence

This painting is of my late mother. I lost her in 2019 of Lou Gehrig's Disease or better known as ALS. Such a horrific disease to watch as your love one succumbs to this progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells controlling voluntary muscle movements. It causes muscle weakness, twitching, difficulty speaking and swallowing, cramps, stiffness, and respiratory problems. There is no cure, and treatment focuses on managing symptoms to improve quality of life. The prognosis of her disease grim but her sense of humor still sparked in her eyes until close to the end of life.

Creating this painting became therapeutic for me as all my emotions poured out onto the canvas. I wanted to capture her essence. Her eyes reflected a smile for a brief moment as depicted in the older photo. The other photos are of my mom as a child and another in mid-age. 

This painting should have been a real challenge since I have had very little experience painting with oil. However, I took to this project like I knew what I was doing but actually had no clue where to begin. 

When choosing pigments it became almost instinctive and were so different from what I generally used with other previous portraits. The deep purples and dark brown hues along with the dark corals seemed off putting in the beginning of the underpainting. Almost scary as shown below. 

The painting came together quickly but as each layer dried and more time passed between the layers. I was leery to continue adding more layers out of fear of messing it up. So it hangs on my wall, partially completed until I get the confidence to finish. 

What I love most about this painting; as I look at this painting in the eye's of my mother. I see her looking back at me with love and it feels like she is near. 

Weird but peaceful!